Fans hoping to root on the 49ers in person Sunday can't seem to catch a break.

The remaining tickets for the NFC Championship Game between the 49ers and the Seahawks at Seattle's CenturyLink Field went on sale at 10 a.m. Monday. The few thousand seats not already held by season-ticket holders sold out in 43 minutes.

With the Seahawks seeking to bolster their "12th man" home-field advantage by denying sales to Californians - only credit cards with addresses from Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Alaska and Hawaii were allowed - 49ers fans looking for tickets had to venture online.

What they found on ticket exchange sites like StubHub and Ticketmaster was not encouraging.

At SeatGeek, an online ticket search engine, roughly 6,000 tickets were being sold Monday for an average of $680 - the highest price outside of a Super Bowl since 2010, according to Connor Gregoire, a spokesman for the site. He said club-level seats near the 50-yard line were changing hands for upward of $3,000.

The most expensive seat? One ticket holder was asking $122,102 on StubHub - a base price of $111,000, plus $11,000 tacked on for service fees and shipping. But Cameron Papp, a spokesman for StubHub, said such astronomical solicitations never draw buyers.

Still, demand is strong. SeatGeek reported that more than 40 percent of traffic to the entire site early Monday was coming from Californians looking for tickets to the game, with another 30 percent coming from Washington.

"This game is definitely the most searched-for on our site," said Papp. "The high demand could be because of the regulations Seattle put in, but this is also the rubber match between division rivals."

On Monday, some 49ers fans said they saw the Seahawks' move to exclude Californians from buying tickets as just another shot fired in a bitter rivalry.

"It's a pretty standard Seattle move," said Ryan Lee, a 31-year-old lifelong fan, as he shopped at a 49ers team store on Market Street in San Francisco. "It's completely underhanded."

Asked if he would consider spending more than $600 on a ticket, he just laughed.

The Seahawks' move to restrict ticket sales is not unprecedented. The Denver Broncos did it last week, only selling tickets to fans from the Rocky Mountain region for their playoff game against San Diego, and are doing so again this week for their home clash against the New England Patriots for the AFC Championship Game.

Niners officials declined to say Monday whether they would have put any restrictions on ticket sales if they had hosted the NFC title game at Candlestick Park.

"It's not the first time it's been done," Gregoire observed. "But it does seem like Seattle is trying to make a statement."